Random Thoughts: Web Development and Labels and Stereotypes

I have been learning HTML and CSS for the past few weeks. For my first project, I already finished designing my portfolio website which will be uploaded very soon. I am quite proud of it, considering how little my background in actual coding websites. Of course, I have been involved in different web development projects but I have been always on the product management side. I have worked with different teams of web designers and most of them were great, but sometimes, I usually had a good idea but it ended up being blocked by the designers saying that it couldn’t be done. Now that I know how to do some things on actual coding, well, I think I wouldn’t be fooled the next time I have a design idea.

But beyond the actual coding, there is a lesson I contemplated while working on my first project.

You see, in order to target specific items HTML elements are needed to be labeled properly. It could get really, really hard to target a nested element. The next thing you’ll know is that you messed up your entire CSS just because you have something wrong in the code targeting the label. This brings me to a realization how efficient labels could be– and it applies to real world.

Labels help us comprehend things at a certain extent. It is hard for us to get the idea of something without a name for it. I think the necessity of comprehending things is the cause for labeling things. In working on my first project, defining clearly the elements of my website (with class and id attributes), helped me understand how I will be styling them, I had a definite idea of how to target them in CSS. In the real world, labels and stereotypes make us grasp a very abstract idea, at a certain extent.

Labels and stereotypes. They can be both good and bad.

The only trouble with labels and stereotypes is that it also complicates things, as much as it simplifies some aspects of things. In web development, the more labels you create, the more confusing they could get. The same thing happens in real life, labels can confuse us. Take for example sexuality. Clearly we have a good grasp of the ideas of lesbianism, gayness, but bisexuality, transgenderism, and the other labels are kind of new to us. As a gay man myself, I must admit that I am still confused about transgendered and transexual. Or remember your biology exams during high school, how confused were you on all the terms they made us memorize?